I have been reading my college reunion materials and trying to plan a trip down memory lane. It reminded me that on the third or fourth morning I was on campus, a boy with a gun a million miles from home…no really...we had mandatory ROTC…we were awakened to the blasting music from the then hit movie, The Good the Bad and the Ugly with Clint Eastwood. Great sound track. The noise had something to do with hazing the freshman. In any case, the idea of the good, the bad and the ugly has had me thinking recently.
There are lots of good ideas. There are good ideas for doing well, that is, for making money…too many of those…just none that I ever had.
But I want to write about good ideas for doing good. For 40 years I have worked in and around numerous fields and disciplines that are intended to help some groups in need or to solve some social or human problem. Many times, good people have good ideas to make things better.
The problem is, most human service organizations don’t pay very well and many, maybe most people who give it a try move on to better paying jobs. That is where the ugly come in. The ugly are the people who take good ideas for doing good and ruin them by trying to make them into something for doing well…usually for them to personally do well. That is when good ideas get bad.
The ugly are usually people who think they know more and better than the poor suckers who work in human service programs. The other source of ugly is state and federal bureaucracy. Virtually every human service program is regulated by some state or federal agency. The people who work in those agencies rarely come from experience with the organizations they control. They are prone to find the “why not” for every good idea. In order to assure control, they place endless requirements for funding or license approvals.
The current budget crisis is making it almost impossible to keep the good and will almost certainly protect and promote the breeding of the ugly. That is bad.
In the 60s we had a lot of good ideas…you remember…peace, civil rights and women’s rights. I think it was easier to spot the ugly…they were over 30 and worked for the government. Over the years the ugly have had such brilliant ideas as quotas, reverse discrimination, and an endless string of military peace-keeping missions that look remarkably like wars.
I guess the good news is that despite the best efforts of the ugly, a lot of good came from the good ideas of the 60s. I just hope the good ideas of today can survive the attempts of the ugly to make them bad.
